1. Field of Invention
The invention generally relates to the field of communications. More particularly, the invention is directed to methods and apparatus for automatically reporting faults in a distributed communication network.
2. Description of Relevant Art
Telephony is the technology associated with the electronic transmission of voice, fax, or other information between distant parties using systems historically associated with the telephone. With the arrival of computers and the transmittal of digital information over telephone systems and the use of radio to transmit telephone signals, the distinction between telephony and telecommunication has become difficult to find. Moreover, with the advent of Internet telephony (i.e., the use of the Internet rather than the traditional telephone company infrastructure and rate structure to exchange spoken or other telephone information), the Internet has now made available (at local phone connection rates) international or other long-distance calls that are much less expensive than those made through the traditional call arrangement.
This great savings in communication costs has, in turn, prompted many companies to configure their telephone systems into LAN (local area network) type telephony systems that are ultimately coupled to and communicate with the Internet by way of a computer based bidirectional gateway, also referred to as a “telephony intranet server”, or TIS unit. Currently, nearly all business telephone systems are based on a centralized, or star network, design where all telephones and trunk lines converge on a single switching point, typically a PBX or in some cases a programmable switch. Despite its popularity, there are a lot of problems with this kind of network architecture. These problems include, 1) if the central switch dies, the phone network is dead, 2) each switching product is typically usable only within a specific size range in that scaling to the next level means throwing the old switch out and buying a new one, and 3) a closed architecture where everything from the switch to individual telephone handsets are proprietary thereby limiting customer choices.
For these and other reasons, distributed telephone systems which use IP networks to route calls between nodes have started to become more attractive to businesses. Typically, the conventional distributed telephone system use IP based or ATM based LAN/WAN cabling to connect many small systems into a single super-system resulting in a fully distributed telephone network which can scale to an essentially infinite port capacity. In addition, the conventional distributed telephone system has many redundant components that will support many types of handsets, from standard analog sets to standards compliant IP telephones running H.323 over Ethernet.
Unfortunately, however, the distributed nature of the distributed network system makes the ability to identify and locate a malfunctioning component within the network very time consuming and costly. This problem of determining the location and type of malfunction is compounded as the distributed network increases in size and complexity greatly increasing the potential downtime for those affected systems.
Therefore, what is desired is an improved method and apparatus for efficiently identifying both a malfunctioning component and the nature of the malfunction in a distributed telecommunications system.